He says that if you land a a hook kick on someone full force and you miss you can rip your Achilles tendon. Now I've been throwing hook kicks for quick count... 18 years and have never hurt myself. Is his claim accurate? To be honest I rarely throw hook kicks in sparring or fights so I can't comment to expert opinion. In my educated guess it's utter hogwash. I've tried to cut through deer tendons with a knife and had severe trouble..... yet I've know athletes to tear their own Achilles tendons.

Edit: I should add he fights in Thailand, he's not some random youtuber, the only reason I'm giving this credence.

I've seen this video before. This guy is like the mini Randy Johnson of TKD. He's all arms and legs, and so has whipping crane power in his technique.

For the record...

I practice and teach this kick. A left spinning hook kick was in the "old" dan kumite. Okinawa officially dropped it because too many people were getting hurt by it. I re-instituted it for the very reason they dropped it. If Uechika were getting hurt by this kick, well maybe the bonehead choreographers got the defense wrong. Indeed this is the only technique I've thrown where I accidentally knocked someone out. I figured out what the problem was, changed the defense, and now have taught it for decades without anyone else ever getting hurt....

I tend to do a near-full-chamber version. Why? Conservation of angular momentum. The more you extend the leg out, the slower you spin. Meanwhile in Uechi dojos you're fighting people who salivate at the thought of a fighter exposing the back. What rules?? Expose the back and you are toast. Same goes if you're facing a grappler. I tend to combine Uechi and grappling methods to find the RNC hold like a laser-guided missile finds its target. So the way I teach it you sacrifice just a little bit of power so your spin is lightning quick with a full leg chamber. At the last second you extend your leg out to execute a snapping hook. Trust me it works - as I accidentally found out one day....

In teaching the spinning hook kick, I spend a bit of time trying to explain the "old" and the "modern" way of doing it per the explanation on this video. And that's the subject of TSDguy's thread.

Alrighty then... let's get down to it.

By his explanation, the "old" method with the dorsiflexed ankle is inferior because you're exposing your Achilles tendon and you might get an owie on it. Hmm...

But - IN MY OPINION - he's way off base on the reason to do the "old" vs. the "new" approach. To use an analogy, it would be like saying we do seiken fists instead of shoken fists in our sparring because we don't want to hurt our fingers. Hogwash! The reason I accidentally sent my partner to the ER is because my heel bone connected with his jaw bone. After the two connected his jawbone grew a golf-ball-sized hematoma and he had amnesia for a day. Had I instead hit him slap-style with the bottom of my foot, I merely would have knocked him on his bum with a nasty bitchslap. The former situation is dangerous and could lead to permanent injury or death. The latter situation will keep Johnny showing up to the dojang and paying his TKD dues.

So - IN MY OPINION - the "new" approach is like target practice with a reduced charge in the shell. There are fewer injuries to the recipient, and so folks will keep on throwing them. Keep on throwing them at each other and you get better at them. Presumably you can dorsiflex your ankle at any point.

Furthermore... When you instead extend your ankle and hit with the flat of the foot, it is true that your Achilles tendon isn't as exposed. But your plantar facia is. Oops! (The plantar facia is the band of tissue in-between the heel and ball of foot.) So there's no 100% safe situation here. If you miss you miss, and bad things can happen. Moral of the story? Don't fuk up!

We Uechika regularly condition parts of the legs and arms we expect to get bashed. With that in mind, I have a routine I do in my dojos every day. Since I teach and we throw spinning hook kicks, I have partners alternate in-between throwing roundhouse and spinning hook kicks to each other in a back-and-forth fashion. We slam our legs into their two-armed "blocks" - both arms up in the case of the spinning hook. We get our Achilles tendons hit in a controlled fashion - over and over. No problem. Over time it and the calf muscle get pretty well conditioned to the contact. So one "cure" to the "problem" is the hair of the dog that bit you. The difference between a Uechi and a TKD dojo is we do it without pads - and love it. More contact = more endorphins = more pleasure while we galvanize our weapons. Yea, we're sick in that way.

On the defensive side here, there's a lesson to be learned. Whenever there is a looping technique, there are exposed tendons that can be attacked. The "knife hand block" of karate isn't. It is an attack to the biceps tendon of the everyday haymaker that any emotionally-hijacked drunk will be throwing at you on the street. In all of our partner conditioning exercises, there's a yin and a yang component. We're both building our iron shirt and understanding how to hurt our naked opponent.

Whenever you attack, you create vulnerabilities. Understanding all that and exploiting it is what we do.

That's what I was thinking. His version just feels... wrong. It's still a pretty good tutorial though, and I think he makes a lot of good points. Particularly about only slightly cocking your leg, I see too many people thinking the power comes from your hamstring or something weird like that.

By the way, TKD dojangs don't generally spar with much or any padding. WTF only use the chest protector, which I hated because it makes your torso weak. ITF skip that but use hand and shin pads which is probably ideal. I was at an ATA gym for a while and they didn't even use cups or mouth guards.

I see too many people thinking the power comes from your hamstring or something weird like that.

It's basic sequential summation of movement. Power starts with the larger core muscles, and radiates out to the extremity. Swinging your leg is no different than swinging a bat.

With that in mind... This is what a baseball player does to get power. Note how he gets the player to focus on the power from the core with the green band around his legs. Note in the latter part of the video how he employs a "full chamber" of the bat before extending it. In particular you see the full chamber at 3:35 to 3:40.

Here he uses a fungo bat to get "bat speed." But that's similar to spinning quickly while fully chambered. (Application of the principle of conservation of angular momentum.) In the case of the martial artist, you extend the leg at the last minute to land the shot.

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